Tidal Music Streaming Service – HiFi Audio, Exclusive Content and More

There are quite a few different options when it comes to choosing a music streaming service. With apps like Spotify, Amazon Music Unlimited, SoundCloud Go, Apple Music, and a few others there’s more competition now.

With more competition, comes more innovation. The Tidal Musicstreaming service offers exclusive content, high-resolution audio streaming, music videos, and more.

Tidal Music Streaming Service – What’s Included?

Tidal is a subscription-based high-fidelity audio streaming service that has close to 50 million tracks, and close to 200,000 music videos in their library. All this is at the tips of your fingers to choose from whenever you need to listen to the latest album or single from your favorite artist.

The First Artist-Owned Service of its Kind

The idea behind keeping it artist-owned is that the artists can pay other artists what they deem as a “fair” price for their hard work.

It’s pretty ingenious and I think it’s good that the artists recognize their worth and decided to take action to help each other. (Plus that means more high quality content and hopefully better live shows, for us as consumers.)

Support the Artists Who Entertain Us

Supporting artists is often overlooked in the digital age and there seems to be a sense of entitlement around consuming their work. People, like myself, still buy physical merchandise such as vinyl, t-shirts, or CDs but I think it’s becoming the norm to stream only.

With streaming throwing a wrench in the process it’s easier for artists to be heard but not necessarily as easy to make a living entertaining us.

There are two different options to choose from. The Hi-Fi and the Premium option. Keep reading to see the difference between the two.

Tidal Hi-Fi Membership

One of the main things that sets Tidal apart from apps like Spotify or Amazon Music is the fact that they offer hi-fi audio quality. For those of you that consider yourself an audiophile, this is an important, if not deal-breaking factor.

While some people don’t pay too close attention to the type of music file that they’re listening to, keep in mind that after you experience the 30-day trial and go back to your previous service, you’ll notice quite a big difference.

lThey Give You The Option Between Mastered and Lossless Tracks

Lossless files are basically a compressed form of information that preserves the pristine quality of the file before it was compressed after you open it up again.

After the engineer has worked his/her magic on the vocals and instrumentation of a band or artist, they want us to experience the same song that they carefully crafted for maximum listening pleasure.

Examples of Lossless Files include:

WAV

FLAC

ALAC

What You Get With Hi-Fi:

30-Day Free Trial

Lossless hi-fi streaming quality

High-Definition Music Videos

Editorial About Your Favorite Artists

Offline Streaming

Priced at $19.99/Month (at the time of this review)

Offering lossless audio files is pretty groundbreaking stuff in the online streaming world. As far as I know, there aren’t any other services offering this feature.

Tidal Premium Membership

An AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) music file would sound better than an MP3 file and could only be played on certain music players while an MP3 can be played on most portable players. This is why when you download a song from iTunes but don’t have an iPod, you might have to convert the file to an MP3.

What You Get With Premium:

30 Day Free-Trial

Standard Streaming Quality

High-Definition Music Videos

Editorial About Your Favorite Artists

Offline Streaming

Priced at $9.99/Month (at the time of this review)

The bottom line here is that if you’re fine with the iTunes audio quality and don’t need or want anything better, the Premium sub would be your best bet.

Special Discounted Memberships

Students of accredited universities can get a 50% discount and military servicemen can get a 40% discount.

Who Gets Your Money?

75% of all membership fees go directly to record labels who then pay the individual artists and songwriters. They claim that they pay the musicians the highest percentage compared to all the other music apps.

Exclusive Tidal-Specific Releases

Another great feature that artists and these companies have been offering is an artist/band-specific release that only subscribers will have exclusive access to (before the general public and non-subscribers.) Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo was released and streamed exclusively here until it became the first streaming-only album to top the Billboard charts.

Also, there are exclusive music videos that can only be viewed by using this service. This feature is included in both the Premium and Hi-Fi option. Some have said that music videos are a dying art form but if you hop on YouTube and take a look at the number of views they’re getting it’s hard to make that argument.

Visual Aesthetics & UI

In my opinion the app is more intuitive to interact with and is more visually appealing than other streaming apps. It feels like more attention to detail that music lovers would notice was implemented to enhance the overall experience.

Genre Selection – Just Hip-Hop?

There is a wide selection of genres (and moods) to choose from so keep in mind that it’s not a hip-hop only service. There is definitely an underlying focus on hip-hop, which makes sense since it’s owned by Jay-Z. All this in mind, if you’re a hardcore jazz or indie fan they have that on there for you too.

Common Feedback & Criticism

One of the common complaints about this app is the cost to use it. When you compare prices against it’s competition it does cost more. What doesn’t get taken into consideration is WHY it’s a bit more expensive.

Amazon Music and Spotify DON’T give you the option to stream hi-fi music while Tidal does. Amazon Music doesn’t offer music videos within their app either. If music videos and sound quality isn’t as important to you then maybe one of the other services would better suit your needs.

Wrapping Up – Some Things to Remember

Overall, I think Tidal deserves a little more credit than it gets. If nothing else, you can sign up for the FREE 30-day Trial and check it out. You can see if you like it and if you’re not happy with the service, cancel it and go back to your previous service.

What the Tidal Music streaming service offers is hi-fi audio quality, exclusive content including Tidal specific music videos, and a large selection of genres to pick from. There’s something for everyone even if you’re not too picky about the actual sound quality when you’re streaming music.

What Do You Think?

I’d love to hear your thoughts about why you love it or why you hate it (and anything in between.) Hopefully you’ve gotten some useful information by reading this. Feel free to leave your thoughts below and I’ll be sure to get back to you as soon as I can!

Unless you want to listen to lossless audio (instead of the more-standard MP3s) the premium at $9.99 would be a pretty good option.

You mentioned that you’re already using a quality sound system and it might actually be worth it to pay a little bit extra. That way you can really get the most out of your smart TV’s sound system.

It really comes down to your personal preference and your ultimate goal for using Tidal’s music streaming service. You might as well sign up for the 30 day trial and see what you think. (The audio playback is pretty impressive for a mobile streaming service.)

I agree, since most music is pretty portable now it can make it seem like a less-valuable, intangible object (instead of a piece of the artist’s soul) like you hinted at.

Good luck with the trial, I think you’ll really enjoy it! Thanks for taking a look at our Tidal review. 🙂

Thanks for the kind words Wayne, I know how much it helps to have a good idea of the visual aspect – especially for a music streaming app where you’ll want to know how good the user experience and overall design and will be.

If you mostly watch music videos and want access to exclusive videos that can’t be found anywhere else – Tidal is the way to go without a doubt.

As of now, other services such as Amazon Music and Spotify do not offer the same amount of exclusive content. (As an additional bonus, Tidal’s streaming service also has hi-res audio files in case you just want to listen to music, not just watch the music videos.)

Either way, I think it’s a great idea to give it a try for 30 days and see if you like it enough to pay for a monthly subscription. 🙂 Thanks for stopping by, I hope you enjoy the free trial!